AGENDA

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Featured Demonstration Hosted By:

As customer expectations evolve, organizations respond by quickly deploying new technologies. However, great brands know they can’t rest on technology innovations alone to inspire customer loyalty. In fact, the more technology we have, the more we need human beings – there are things technology can never provide. Our customer service agents must become customer experience experts. By the time the customer talks to a human being, they need an expert in product/service, someone who can solve complex issues, and make a personal connection. Technology and people must be equal partners. Your technology might be ready, but are your people?

Key Take-Aways:

• Technology Is Empowering – Insight on why technology isn’t replacing people; it’s empowering them to become experts and provide the customer with a better experience
• Becoming an Expert – Blueprint to why an agent’s skill must change as fast as new technologies – and how to help all call center agents understand the changing marketplace, customer expectations, and skills that distinguish an expert from an agent
• Managers Lead Change – Guide to why the transformation from call center agents to call center experts doesn’t just happen and how managers must lead agents through the necessary mindset and skillset changes to make the switch

In these dynamic times for customer engagement, we must ensure we leverage the customer metrics that matter most. Unfortunately, data alone won’t drive the transformation required to win and often can generate an environment that supports conflicting priorities. Embracing a ‘client-first’ metrics-driven approach enabled HBC to dramatically improve quality and costs to expand a legacy of service, quality, and style in today’s retail environment.

Key Take Aways:

• Best practices for identifying the priorities of your customers throughout their journey
• Ways to generate insight from contact center metrics to grow customer preference and loyalty
• Insight on translating metrics to create the stories that engage the organization to strategic action

Featured Demonstration Hosted By: ServiceNow

By the time your customer reaches a live agent, they really need an expert. So, your agents better be ready. And their ability and skill set starts with YOU. Brands that will lead the next generation of CX in are the ones implementing a multi-pronged strategy that prioritizes both tech and people equally. CX guru and workplace coach, Gary Magenta, will lead you through an interactive diagnostic to evaluate your current customer experience strategy and introduce the steps on how to create customer loyalty for life.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insights on why agents are owners: today’s agents aren’t simply just information-givers, they are problem-solvers with the responsibility to fix the issues of others consistently. Leaders can help their agents live up to their new roles by empowering them with the knowledge, freedom, and confidence to solve issues the way they think best. The result – customer loyalty
• Blueprint of why managers are a priority: leaders need to ensure they are prioritizing their managers as much as they are prioritizing their tech integrations. Managers’ job and skills are evolving because the people on their teams are changing and they must coach their frontline agents in new ways in order to meet the needs and demands of CX in 2020 and beyond
• Guide to why your CX Strategy must always be evolving – to win in CX today; you need to have a twofold strategy that includes a focus on tech and people. Bots and automated tools are essential to thrive in CX, but the focus on the human element must not be sacrificed

We’re in a new decade with consumer expectations higher than ever – and the proof is to simply think for a moment about how we personally act as consumers. Experiences are everything these days, in what is being called the “Experience Economy.” Learn how you can position your organization to thrive by delivering experiences that exceed the expectations of your customers.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Fresh insight on the importance of delivering quality experiences at every customer touchpoint
  • Best practices for driving personalization and customer loyalty in the new Experience Economy

Employee effort has an impact of cost and the customer experience. The ability to quantify that cost of impact helps drive a business case for change. Come learn how forward-thinking practitioners are using new data points, tools and techniques to cast new light on existing KPIs.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on the metrics that matter – where are the gaps in traditional measures as they effect employee effort and experience
• Guide to why all the data matters … use corroborating sources to guard against misinformed analysis; watch out for patterns that reveal lowest common denominator rather than best practice by majority
• Blueprint of how are the benefits realized by the business, IT and the customer – focus on application of the data; what are the planned outcomes for IT, business, employee & customer

The race to perfect customer experience left the employee behind. The self-service experience is simpler, automated and more intuitive. Employees, on the other hand, are dealing with product and service complexity while battling cluttered desktops and manual processes. Failure to recognize the link between employee and customer experience is costing you customers and profit. Join this session for a discussion on intelligent automation as a way to unburden agents of complexity and optimize customer experience.

Key Take-Aways:

• Industry insights into the current and future agent engagement landscape
• Latest trends in intelligent automation technologies for the contact center and their impact on interactions
• Five best practices you can pursue to optimize your agent and customer experience

With virtually all companies regardless of size, region or vertical actively involved in digital transformation, it means we all are painfully aware of the disruption large scale change can create. This is especially problematic within the contact center as it has the greatest impact on both Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX). In fact, many companies already experience near-constant disruption trying to keep up with new trends.  Learn the ‘one’ thing all next-gen tech has in common and how your ability to understand it decides whether change remains disruptive or becomes transformative.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight into how the addition of new technology & channels has altered the velocity and direction of data
• Guide to identifying where you are on the spectrum between disruption and transformation
• Framework for re-establishing data integrity so you can measure both efficiency and effectiveness (extremely critical for CX)
• Examples of ways you can prepare for change ‘right now’ without a ton of budget and that may even reduce the cost of your next-gen tech

Automation is the solution to solving some of the most complex issues affecting our industry today but it can also present some unique challenges. More than 60% of American’s believe automation will have a negative impact on jobs. In this session, learn about some of these challenges and real examples to help you overcome them.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight to methods you can use to address challenges during the planning phase of your automation strategy and ensure your plan stays on course
• Steps you can take as a business leader to successfully shepherd your organization and people through automation projects
• Proven ways to address organizational resistance, and employee concerns to automation

Efficiency in the call center is expected – communicating the obstacles and gaining senior leadership buy in at the physician level can be challenging. This session will discuss how the centralized call center overcame negative PR, communicated process improvements and developed a sustainable recognition and celebration program with zero company funding.

Key Take-Aways:

• Case study in recruiting, hiring and motivating an engaged workforce
• Lessons learned with cross-training and cross-skilling contact center representatives
• Key findings and outcomes regarding executive level communication plans and roll outs that have delivered positive results – without breaking the budget

Practitioners and solution providers host a menu of luncheon discussions on pertinent industry issues. Dine and dish with industry experts. The list of discussion topics will be available on-site.

Hosted By: Acquire BPO, ServiceNow

For those managing large contact centers – are you debating about your contact center  technology needs now and in the future? Are you struggling with how to ensure your enterprise contact center is always on the cutting edge of technology? Are you working on ensuring your customers’ experience never drops? Do you have all kind of data but not sure how to paint the picture you need to secure further investments in your contact center technology? If yes then you need to attend this session to walk away with how to secure those funds needed to take your enterprise contact center to the next level.

Key Take-Aways:

• Methods to mine and utilize existing data sources to fund new technology
• Pragmatic ways to select the best contact center technology for your existing and future contact center needs
• Insight into what the needs of the contact center of the future are
• Insight into how best to deliver and implement new contact center technology features to senior level executives

The best CX is one that is anticipatory, proactive, effortless and starts way before an interaction with the contact center. There are several other organizations in a company that contribute to the CX.  However, the contact center is a frontline organization that hears the voice of the customer firsthand.  More than any organization in a company, they have insights into how the company can improve the CX – within the contact center and beyond. How do you bring these disparate organizations together to create this seamless experience? How are VOC insights leveraged across the company – whether it’s marketing, product development, R&D, or even the management committee? This interactive session will explore practical ways to facilitate the sharing of these insights across the company, as well as unpack first-hand examples of the upstream impact of the contact center and how it can become a significant value add (strategic) to the entire company.

Key Take-Aways:

• Guide to developing a one-office design (integrated front and back office)
• Tips and tricks on how to help drive process and service/product improvements
• Insights into how to make the contact center a strategic contributor to the company
• Best practices for coordinating with organizational stakeholders
• Practical approaches to synch with product development, R&D, and marketing

We all want customers to enjoy the best possible customer service experience, while the enterprise incurs the least possible cost. But sometimes the “least possible cost” objective of workforce productivity and technology clouds our awareness of the human side of the equation. This roundtable session will discuss the effect of agent attitudes during service interactions and how these attitudes are increasingly regarded as an important consideration, as better agent attitudes can often be the difference between a mediocre and an exemplary service experience for your customers.

Key Take-Aways:

• Key findings of recent research on the agent experience regarding their preferences, opinions about technology, and contact center culture
• Insight on how these findings can affect agent attitudes in their daily work
• Techniques to improve the overall agent experience
• Fresh perspectives and strategies to help keep your agents happy and engaged

Your customers expect a personalized, effortless service experience. You want greater contact center efficiency. Shifting interactions from phone to self-service can achieve both goals—and we know this is easier said than done. Join this roundtable to discuss customer-centric strategies for providing the assistance customers need, when they need it, while also improving agent productivity.

Key Take-Aways:

• Strategies to increase customer self-service rates
• Best practices for creating and updating knowledge
• Insights on adopting Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®)
• Perspectives on machine learning, mobile, digital workflows, and other technologies
• Lessons learned when integrating knowledge and communities with case management

KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.

Leveraging AI to improve customer experience is quickly becoming a contact center mandate, however the process and business case for moving forward remains murky. While some decision makers might rely on traditional drivers such as ROI and lower total cost of ownership, our recent primary research suggests that executives are increasingly attaching importance to the soft benefits of AI. This interactive session will explore the results from a recent AI Study and discuss large-scale deployments of conversational AI that support the research findings.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on the titles & departments involved in decision-making for AI implementation and the role it plays in transforming CX
• Hard & soft benefits of implementing AI for CX
• Guide to the overall executive-level impressions about budgeting, funding & measuring AI projects

We are all faced with numerous issues in the day-to-day challenges of our contact centers. The Six Sigma DMAIC process we will explore offers a methodical approach for being able to define the true issue clearly, analyze comprehensively in order to select an appropriate improvement solution, and control the implementation in order to ensure that you gain the expected benefits.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Guide to identifying when you know there is a problem, how do you understand what the problem really is
  • Best practices for picking the right tool(s) to solve the problem
  • Insight on how automation and AI be leveraged in problem solving
  • Tips and tricks to make sure that the selected solution is actually improving things

Featured Demonstration Hosted By: Cicero

The Fix on Tiered Care

Hosted By: Mireille Godin, Vice President, Customer Care, Xplornet Communications
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The Fix on Making B2B CX Personal

Hosted By: Steven Brophy, Director, Customer Care, Ameren
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The Fix on Small Contact Centers

Hosted By: Jamie Homen, Vice President, Customer Service and Support, CareerBuilder
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The Fix on Vendor Aggregation and Management

Hosted By: Alex McBratney, Vice President, Strategic Accounts, TechStyle Fashion Group
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The Fix on Raising NPS

The Fix on Must We Wow?

The Fix on Supporting and Managing Virtual Teams

The Fix on Handling Social Media Detractors

Are you interested in positioning your contact center as a competitive advantage? One key component is to integrate into your company’s overall digital strategy. But where do you start?  This session will arm you with best practices and lessons learned to accelerate your digital transformation and enrich your customer experience through the contact center.

Key Take-Aways:

• Guide to how the contact center plays a critical role within a modern digital experience
• Best practices for combining the best of the two worlds: Human Ingenuity and Artificial Intelligence
• Insights into how CX digital transformation will have a longer-term impact on the contact center

Cap off the day with newfound friends over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres!

Lace up your sneakers and get your endorphins flowing with a little exercise. It’s the perfect start to a great day of content and networking!

Get energized while building strength and flexibility with us. This upbeat, creative yoga practice will link breath and movement to keep you present and centered.

Featured Demonstration Hosted By: SmartAction

Do you know if your business is earning an A+ for creating an exceptional customer experience? The key to delivering an effortless experience is to first begin by truly understanding your customer needs well, and their reasoning for returning to your business – or, reason for not returning to your business? Benefit from the combined experience of these savvy panelists sharing pragmatic ideas for building an effective customer experience strategy. And develop an action plan that will ensure you are not missing the opportunity to deliver an effortless experience for your customers.

Learn, and even more: how to, how to create the case for change and beyond that – how to deliver a compelling, yet realistic business case that can work in any business. Whether you are B2B or B2C, we will deliver and provide you with practical, yet easy to implement solutions that can help you better identify your opportunity and create the strategy that will work for you.

Key Take-Aways:

• A needs analysis methodology
• The building blocks of a blueprint for success with a business case that will work
• Real tools and solutions that will help you improve
• Measures of success to ensure your strategy is effective

Featured Demonstration Hosted By:

As a business thrives, there often comes a point when decision makers need to ask if it is more effective, efficient and economical to engage a business process outsourcing company (BPO). Determining your internal and BPO customer care strategy is the focus of this strategic session.

Key Take-Aways:

• Critical factors for engaging a BPO (when)
• Best practices for choosing one or more BPO partners (who and where)
• Techniques for delivering the expected customer experience seamlessly across internal and outsourced resources (what)
• Insights on leveraging the BPO relationship to advance your internal environment or infrastructure near-term and long-term (how)

This interactive roundtable will discuss challenges in today’s world of ensuring first-class CX at every touch point. The session will unpack the people, technology, tools, culture and innovation – how to bring it all together & effectively measure. It isn’t easy, but those companies who solve for this are best in class!

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for breaking down silos to ensure top-shelf CX in line with your company’s mission
• Tools to enhance the speed of service and ease of doing business
• Process for identifying traps and how to overcome
• Guide to measuring the voice of the customer to ensure the enterprise is heading in the right direction
• Insights on how to effectively utilize the knowledge base from successes as well as failures to continuously improve

To say AI is THE buzzword for 2020 would be an understatement. Many organizations over the past year are forcing POCs with their first deployments of AI and often they are IT lead deployments that have not had an impact on the contact center as promised. In this session, you will hear about real-world implementations for AI-based technology in the contact center and how others have approached deployments of AI to deflect contact volume, reduce costs and improve the customer and agent experience.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insights on why as many as 50% of AI projects failed in 2019, and what you can do to avoid these pitfalls in 2020
• Guide to how your company can approach contact center deflection based on a real-world implementation, and how this cost savings initiative ultimately morphed into a CX solution
• Blueprint of why RPA to improve agent efficiency has been the most successful AI use case to date
• Key findings of how emerging AI platforms driving real improvements that you probably haven’t heard of…yet

Delivering excellence in customer journey is not just about understanding your customer expectations and effort, it is also about knowing how your employees guide the customers through the journey. In this session learn to discover the path your customers and your employees take for CX delivery, how to identify friction and key drop out points & solve them.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Insight on the correlation between EX & CX – just business economics
  • Guide to navigating thru the ocean of data to identify: Wow & How moments for customers & agents
  • Blueprint of how to achieve a 36o degree view of the customer for better personalization and insight into the customer journey
  • Ideas & tips on how to build a loyal fan base (customers & agents)

Practitioners and solution providers host a menu of luncheon discussions on pertinent industry issues. Dine and dish with industry experts. The list of discussion topics will be available on-site.

Hosted By: TTEC

A Top 25 Most Trusted Brand & Hollywood Screenwriter on Virtual Agents that Don’t Suck

Join this session with an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and AAA, one of the Top 25 Most Trusted Brands, who took their most critical CX – emergency roadside assistance – and handed it to an AI-powered virtual agent for voice and SMS self-service.

This interactive working session gets into the gritty details of designing conversation flows for a human-to-machine experience that rivals or exceeds live agents. Mark will do live “mockups” with audience members and step through the complex critical thinking required to determine if and where AI can fit.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Most important principles for human-centric design
  • Real-world examples showcased by AAA and others
  • Schematics of successful interactions
  • How data + business logic keeps virtual agents in their “swim lane”

How do you successfully integrate automation into your contact center to complement your human workforce? Join this interactive session to explore how technology and the human touch can blend seamlessly to transform the way your operations work and deliver positive customer experiences.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for introducing automation into your organization
• Ways to empower your workforce with new technology that makes them better
• How a ‘human + bot’ approach can equal operational and CX success

With real examples of how organizations are getting the benefits from digital transformation programs, this ThinkTank will explore the role of robotics and intelligent automation in delivering improved CX and cost reductions. Join this lively session to unpack how organizations are using intelligent automation to help achieve their CX and financial targets.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on intelligent automation and how organizations are using it in contact centers to gain efficiency without disrupting operations
• Framework to identify how you can identify key processes where you can apply robotics for fast savings
• Critical factors to starting an intelligent automation project and how to get IT on board
• Example of real world scenarios where intelligent automation and robotics have has significant impact

Providing a top notch customer experience is no longer an option, its table stakes to compete in a fast changing environment. Focusing on skill development helps to build top notch reps. Join us to learn how putting skills at the center of your learning program helps you build the team you need to win and keep your customers.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for building a skill matrix that helps drive performance
• Guide to measuring learning that leads to results
• Tips and tricks on how to deliver training that creates impact

86% of companies say that a positive connection with their customers drives loyalty, but companies are finding it difficult to enable their agents to provide that personal connection at scale. This interactive session will explore how to equip agents with the right tools and skills to boost agent productivity while helping agents to build personal connections with customers.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Proven ways to break down silos and give agents a single view of the customer
  • Strategies for automating routine tasks so agents can focus on high-value interactions
  • An understanding of how to scale knowledge and upskill your team

The way organizations deliver customer service, build loyalty and drive growth has been changing non-stop over the last decade with one disruption after the other fundamentally changing engagement with enterprises. This interactive session will take the audience through an entertaining look back at the industry, before fast forwarding to 2020 and beyond. Customers today are hyperconnected, and expect personalized, contextual, fast, friendly and smart service, willing to share their information in exchange for the “immediate gratification” of a question being answered or a problem solved.  Greg will engage the audience for how they are experiencing the evolution.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for aligning on common definitions of terms thrown around in the industry …transformation, omnichannel, cloud…
• Blueprint of the forced behavior of “integrating systems” together as opposed to “orchestrating solutions“
• Insights on how agents are evolving from “system coordinators” to the “human touch on business processes”
• Guide to the transformative shifts are leading customers from “interacting” with businesses to “engaging”

Nurturing your managers…your team!  The typical:  coach, train, set goals, mentor, engage, empower, align activity to business needs, work plans, communicate, and so on. What do you do before and after all of the above?  Pre and post work are critical and ensure success – in this session, we will examine the needed preparation, follow up, and ability to adjust for driving change.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework for prep and follow up on development plans, goal setting, and mentoring
• Best practices for integrating your pre-work in to employee plans and don’t hesitate to change or update once the plan is in motion and why this is important
• Guide to showing your commitment, personalization, and actively driving change and culture
• Communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more

Agents are people too! In this session we will look at methods to not only attract the right people to your organization, but then how to develop and promote them across your company. What roles in your company have your agents been promoted to?

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight into how a Professional Development Program can improve your agent pool and drive increased engagement
• Best practices for agent engagement, development and growth
• Examples of agent and organizational success beyond the contact center

Choose your teams and let your competitive spirit break free. After a buffet dinner, it’s ALL ABOUT Beach Olympics fun! The winning teams will be draped in gold, silver and bronze.

Calling all yogis! Get energized while building strength and flexibility with us. This upbeat, creative yoga practice, will link breath and movement to keep you present and centered. We’ll utilize Sun Salutations, strength building and connected movements to help you face the day with a courageous spirit.

Lace up your sneakers and get your endorphins flowing with a little exercise. It’s the perfect start to a great day of content and networking!

Featured Demonstration Hosted By: Aspect

Until you tap into the full potential of your people, you’re placing an artificial ceiling on purpose, performance, and profits. This headliner on ‘Playing Offense’ draws upon lessons and insights from a front row seat leading in the NFL and NBA, with a playbook on building inspired people, thriving organizations, and championship culture.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on a proven, five-part Playing Offense playbook to achieve internal and external transformation in any arena – by playing the “Inside Game”
• Fresh perspectives on how to unearth a competitive spirit of grit and resilience to transform inevitable disruption and adversity in the current climate into courageous achievement
• Examples of how to inspire significance and purpose in your organizational culture to develop teams of high trust, accountability, and intrinsic motivation

Driving efficiencies in the contact center is only half the battle! This session will showcase a case study of using the contact center to transform opportunity into revenue.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight into positioning the contact center as a strategic asset
• Lessons learned in implementing innovative solutions
• Techniques for getting C-Suite buy-in

Join this real-world use case of how AI-powered automation is rapidly becoming a must-have contact center self-service tool for driving better customer experiences, and how organizations have successfully implemented these technologies by driving user adoption, attaining valuable insights, and avoiding common pitfalls.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight into creating new self-service for emerging technology like Alexa and social media channels
• Guide to the self-service options with advanced natural language capabilities
• Case history of TechStyle’s timeline of self-service implementation, including chatbots, social media, and planned applications
• Best practices for reducing non-revenue generating calls to live agents, offsetting volume spikes associated with subscription billing, and leveraging automation capabilities without sacrificing customer experience